Saturday, February 04, 2006
Will Congress Keep the Pipes Open?
In a USA Today article called Here's Hoping Congress Keeps the Pipes Open, Andrew Kantor writes
Go ahead, look it up. Do the telcos mean
1. Left to or regulated by one's own discretion or judgment
and if so, whose discretion or judgement? Or do they mean
2. Available for use as needed or desired: a discretionary fund
and if so, what laws, regulations, norms or economic incentives will ensure that it'll be available as needed or desired?
Imagine you make a phone call to a friend, but instead of hearing it ring, you get a recording: “We’re sorry, but the person you are calling has not paid Verizon to carry his or her conversations. We apologize for any inconvenience.”Our problem at next Tuesday's Network Neutrality hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee is that the Bellheads will say they're merely improving service for their best customers, and no, no, no they have no intention of blocking certain Web sites, and of course they'll provide ample provisioning for the "discretionary" Internet, as if they know how much that is.
Couldn’t happen, of course. Your phone company will connect you to whomever you call, period . . . A carrier can’t discriminate based on who you’re calling [thanks to 70 years of good law that's now circling the drain -- David I]
Now imagine this: You have a DSL connection from your local phone company. You try to go to, say, www.usatoday.com but instead see a message, “USATODAY.com does not currently have a transport agreement with AT&T to have its content carried to AT&T subscribers. We apologize for any inconvenience.” . . . The scary thing is, it’s something they’re not only discussing, but some are pushing for it.
Go ahead, look it up. Do the telcos mean
1. Left to or regulated by one's own discretion or judgment
and if so, whose discretion or judgement? Or do they mean
2. Available for use as needed or desired: a discretionary fund
and if so, what laws, regulations, norms or economic incentives will ensure that it'll be available as needed or desired?
Technorati Tags: F2C, NetworkNeutrality, OpenAccess
Comments:
Network neutrality is a good handle to grasp to talk about what we used to call "the network we want".
Many of my thoughtful friends read here, and I'd like to ask them: whatever happened to our conversations about user-financed networks?
User-financed networks are as beautiful as network neutrality, but the latter maiden is the only one that gets talked about nowadays. I want to know why.
If we think user-financed networks stand no chance, wait til we try to craft language describing what is network neutrality. Think about how hard it is to talk about software. Then layer on top of that the motives of man as political animal.
Bill posted these slides a few weeks ago. I think they should get some airplay. If I owned my own network, I could stop lobbying myself before I started.
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Many of my thoughtful friends read here, and I'd like to ask them: whatever happened to our conversations about user-financed networks?
User-financed networks are as beautiful as network neutrality, but the latter maiden is the only one that gets talked about nowadays. I want to know why.
If we think user-financed networks stand no chance, wait til we try to craft language describing what is network neutrality. Think about how hard it is to talk about software. Then layer on top of that the motives of man as political animal.
Bill posted these slides a few weeks ago. I think they should get some airplay. If I owned my own network, I could stop lobbying myself before I started.
